The Year Of Acknowleging Mistakes

France's mistake shows taxing wealth doesn't work

"Three years on, President Hollande is shame-facedly scrapping the 75 percent rate, having forcibly re-learned an ancient truth: Wealth taxes don’t redistribute wealth; they redistribute people. Thousands of well-off Frenchmen made the easy journey north, including the country’s richest man, Bernard Arnault."

I'm tempted to say "Duh!". I mean, who would say "Duh" about something so obvious? "Duh!"

"Hollande’s tax, levied on incomes above one million euros, has been a miserable failure. Over its lifespan, it raised around $500 million, a tiny fraction of the original projections. Why? Well, the Paris bureaucrats who made those projections overlooked something rather important. Rich people don’t sit around waiting to be taxed."

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"Parts of Kensington, an expensive district of West London, are now largely Francophone. London is, on some measures, the sixth-largest French city in the world. It pullulates with French financiers and French footballers and French management consultants and French pastry chefs. They have just two things in common. First, all had the get-up-and-go needed to start a career in a new language and a new country. Second, all are paying their taxes to the British Exchequer instead of the French treasury. Merci, mes amis.

Not since the expulsion of France’s Protestants in 1685 has there been such an exodus of entrepreneurs to the Anglosphere; and this wave, like that one, has been a transfusion of talent, leaving the English-speaking world more energetic and France more anemic. Nicolas Sarkozy, well understanding where the relatively small free-market-minded section of his population could be found, launched his presidential election campaign in London."

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